Make no mistake, the community is flooded with environmental modifications because everyone has a different taste of what’s realistic and what’s not. But out of this pool of texture replacements and LUA scripts, one ultimate package has it all; it’s their reimagined cloud textures, uber realistic sky gradients, and stunning scripts that brought more dramatic shadows and varied water waves that earned the spot for this week’s featured freeware, FSEnhancer.

By now, a significant portion of the community would have known or heard of FSEnhancer. Enrico del Bono is the main mastermind behind the environment package, constantly developing, experimenting, and delivering incredible results in-sim! Each revision is a gargantuan step up from the previous. It’s not marketing jargon, but Enrico evidently placed emphasis on how the add-on is the result of a scientific approach to development, constantly taking photos and examining the properties of each element in the sky: “a meticulous research on the way light scatters in the atmosphere, from dawn to dusk, in many different places of the world.” This delivers results which in my opinion, rival the likes of Ultra Weather XP.

Version 0.5 brought us new water, shadows and atmosphere renderings, but the next step would be a whole new level for freeware environment mods:

The constant drive for earning the spot for the ultimate premier weather add-on doesn’t stop. The next revision, v0.6 brings even more detail to how clouds are rendered by separating each formation into three distinctive layers: base, body and top. With this new structure, the new version is able to produce much more convincing cumulus cloud formations (which seemingly, isn’t what the default X-Plane engine is designed to do), check out this preview video:

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FSEnhancer is one of many distinctive efforts by freeware thinkers and doers in the X-Plane world, a testament to our impressively close-knit freeware developer community. I for one am glad to see it contribute to shaping X-Plane and its collective like-minders in the most accessible way.

“The long road to photorealism has just started.”

P.S. No, this isn’t sponsored by FSE. I genuinely think FSE is the best thing there is when it comes to free environment add-ons.

Bring on 0.6!